August 22, 2008

"Maybe the quest for truth takes a lot of patience, labor into matters invisible.." is well put. While we labor into the invisible, He too labors in us, the visible. Let alone the life of a supreme Yogi like Sri Aurobindo, it is even difficult for us to discern the workings of the Divine Diplomat in our own lives as "He comes unseen into our darker parts And, curtained by the darkness, does His work" often using "our fall a means for greater rise".

“It certainly is legitimate to cite Aurobindo’s own statements about this and other inner experiences. But personal reminiscences don’t count for much in scholarly biographies unless they are backed up by objective data and analysis. But what sort of objective data was I to look for? (Nobody knew what was going on in Aurobindo’s head.) If I wanted to discuss this inner event, did I have to switch (in mid stream) from the conventions of scholarly biography to the conventions of spiritual biography, that is, hagiography? Or could I get beyond the conventions of both genres?”

If something is not a scholarly biography, then does the spiritual biography automatically become hagiography? In my opinion it need not be so. As an example, I don’t consider Georges van Vrekhem’s Beyond Man as hagiography at all. And mark the phrase personal reminiscences don’t count for much in scholarly biographies unless they are backed up by objective data and analysis.

But what are these objective data?

Records in government files?

If there aren’t such objective data, then do we dismiss all spiritual experiences narrated in one way or the other, through letters, through poetry, during private conversations, for instance?

When the Mother says that Sri Aurobindo’s coming was a direct action from the Supreme, do we ask her, “but Madame, where are the data?”

Otherwise was she simply telling us stories and that we the gullibles were believing in them?

Ultimately it looks as though each one to his own liking, and so one need not really argue about these matters. ~ RYD

“Avatarhood is one of the knottiest of metaphysical questions.” True, and to us it will always remain so, a “great mystery of the Divine manifest in humanity”, as long as we will live only in our restricted domain of mind. But divine works, divyam karma, and divine birth, divyam janma are an occult-spiritual fact and they just cannot come in the purview of the inflexible and strict rational thinking. By positing it that way one might arrive at some truth of it, unravel a part of the mystery, but the true significance of the purpose and process of Avatarhood will always elude that faculty of ours. In any case one thing is certain, that the Avatar comes in order to take in a decisive way the evolution a step farther. Let’s read Sri Aurobindo in The Essays on the Gita:

“For to the modern mind Avatarhood is one of the most difficult to accept or to understand of all the ideas that are streaming in from the East upon the rationalised human consciousness. It is apt to take it at the best for a mere figure for some high manifestation of human power, character, genius, great work done for the world or in the world, and at the worst to regard it as a superstition,—to the heathen a foolishness and to the Greeks a stumbling-block. The materialist, necessarily, cannot even look at it, since he does not believe in God; to the rationalist or the Deist it is a folly and a thing of derision; to the thoroughgoing dualist who sees an unbridgeable gulf between the human and the divine nature, it sounds like a blasphemy. The rationalist objects that if God exists, he is extracosmic or supracosmic and does not intervene in the affairs of the world, but allows them to be governed by a fixed machinery of law,—he is, in fact, a sort of far-off constitutional monarch or spiritual King Log, at the best an indifferent inactive Spirit behind the activity of Nature, like some generalised or abstract witness Purusha of the Sankhyas; he is pure Spirit and cannot put on a body, infinite and cannot be finite as the human being is finite, the ever unborn creator and cannot be the creature born into the world,—these things are impossible even to his absolute omnipotence. To these objections the thoroughgoing dualist would add that God is in his person, his role and his nature different and separate from man; the perfect cannot put on human imperfection; the unborn personal God cannot be born as a human personality; the Ruler of the worlds cannot be limited in a nature-bound human action and in a perishable human body. These objections, so formidable at first sight to the reason, seem to have been present to the mind of the Teacher in the Gita when he says that although the Divine is unborn, imperishable in his self-existence, the Lord of all beings, yet he assumes birth by a supreme resort to the action of his Nature and by force of his self-Maya; that he whom the deluded despise because lodged in a human body, is verily in his supreme being the Lord of all; that he is in the action of the divine consciousness the creator of the fourfold Law and the doer of the works of the world and at the same time in the silence of the divine consciousness the impartial witness of the works of his own Nature,—for he is always, beyond both the silence and the action, the supreme Purushottama. And the Gita is able to meet all these oppositions and to reconcile all these contraries because it starts from the Vedantic view of existence, of God and the universe.”

So if the modern mind can open itself to such an all-comprehensive view of existence, of God and the universe, to the metaphysics of spirituality, based on spiritual experience and realisation, then there is a chance of it entering into the spirit of the Avatarhood also. ~ RYD

I like the concluding paragragh "So if the modern mind....entering into the spirit of the Avatarhood also". Further if we accept the principle of spiritual evolution - an evolution of consciousness - just as we accept Darwinian evolution for the physical forms, then the concept of Avatarhood would be less abstruse. Reply